Iron Kingdom

by Clark, Christopher

  The political climate was now exceptionally volatile. Relations between the SPD and the Independents were very tense. Berlin was thronging with armed workers and units of radicalized soldiers – the most boisterous of these was the People’s Naval Division, whose headquarters were the Royal Stables, an imposing neo-baroque building on the eastern side of Palace Square. There was talk on the extreme left of an armed uprising. At a general meeting of the Independent Social Democrats of Greater Berlin, the Spartakist leader and ideologue Rosa Luxemburg attacked the compromise policy of the Independents and demanded that they withdraw their allegiance from the Ebert government. There was no point, she declared, in debating with ‘Junkers and bourgeois’ over whether one should introduce socialism:

  Socialism does not mean getting together in a parliament and passing laws, socialism means for us overthrowing the ruling classes with all the brutality [loud laughter] that the proletariat is capable of deploying in its struggle.17

  The flashpoint for an open conflict came on 23 December. On this day, after reports of looting and vandalism by ‘red sailors’, the provisional government ordered the People’s Naval Division to leave the Royal Stables and quit the capital. Instead of complying, the sailors seized and mistreated the Berlin city commandant Otto Wels, surrounded the chancellery building (seat of the SPD/USPD government), occupied the central telephone exchange, and cut off the lines connecting the chancellery with the outside world. Using a secret chancellery hotline to the Military Supreme Command in Kassel, Ebert requested military assistance. General Lequis was called in from Potsdam to restore order. His performance was not confidence-inspiring: on the morning of Christmas Day 1918, his troops drove the ‘red sailors’ away from the chancellery and bombarded the Royal Stables for two hours. It was enough to secure a surrender by the rebellious sailors, but word had got around and an angry (and partly armed) crowd of Spartakists, Independents and leftist fellow travellers soon gathered around the troops, who promptly withdrew from the scene.

  The débâcle of Christmas Day 1918 had a polarizing effect on the political climate. It encouraged the extreme left to believe that a more resolute strike would suffice to break the authority of the Ebert – Scheidemann regime. It also ruined the prospects for further collaboration between the SPD and the Independents, who left the provisional national government on 29 December. Their Prussian colleagues withdrew from the Prussian coalition cabinet on 3 January. The majority SPD now ruled alone in the state.18 Groener responded to the growing tension by calling for the formation of volunteer units, or Freikorps, a term that recalled the stirring myths of 1813. One of these had already formed in Westphalia under General Ludwig Maercker, and others soon followed: the Freikorps Reinhard, under the former Guards officer Colonel Wilhelm Reinhard, was created on Boxing Day; another Freikorps assembled at Potsdam under Major Stephani, composed of demobilized officers and men from the I Regiment of Foot Guards and the Imperial Potsdam Regiment. Freikorps recruits were driven by an unsteady mix of ultra-nationalism, a desire to make good the humiliation at the German defeat, hatred of the left and visceral fear of a Bolshevik uprising. All these units were placed under the general command of the Silesian career officer General Walther Freiherr von Lüttwitz.

  To ensure harmonious relations between the military and the civilian authority, Ebert appointed the SPD man Gustav Noske to head the ministry of military affairs. Noske, the son of a weaver and an industrial worker from the city of Brandenburg, had worked as an apprentice basket weaver before joining the SPD and achieving distinction within the party for his services to socialist journalism. In 1906, he had joined the SPD parliamentary fraction in the Reichstag, where he was associated with the right-wing SPD leadership group around Ebert. Noske had long been known for his friendly attitude to the military; he joined the provisional government on 29 December, after the departure of the USPD coalition partners. When asked to oversee the provisional government’s campaign against the leftist revolutionaries in Berlin, Noske is said to have replied: ‘Fine. Someone has to be the bloodhound, and I am not afraid of taking the responsibility.’19

  The next uprising was not long in coming. On 4 January, the Berlin provisional government ordered the dismissal of Emil Eichhorn, the commissary police chief of Berlin, a left-wing Independent who had refused to support the government during the ‘Christmas Battles’. Eichhorn refused to resign, choosing instead to distribute arms from the police arsenal to left-radical troops and to barricade himself in the police presidency. Without authorization from the USPD leadership, the police chief ordered a general insurrection, a call that was answered with gusto by the extreme left. On 5 and 6 January, the Communists mounted their first concerted attempt to seize power in Berlin, pillaging arsenals, arming bands of radical workers and occupying key buildings and positions in the city. Once again, the SPD provisional government called in troops to bring an end to the unrest.

  For some days the city was transformed into a lurid and dangerous jungle, a dadaist nightmare. There was shooting at every corner and it was seldom clear who was shooting at whom. Neighbouring streets were occupied by opposing forces, there were desperate struggles on roofs and in cellars, machine-guns positioned anywhere suddenly struck up fire and then fell silent, squares and streets that had just now been quiet were suddenly filled with running, fleeing pedestrians, groaning wounded and the bodies of the dead.20

  On 7 January, Harry Kessel witnessed a battle scene on the Hafenplatz in Berlin: government troops were trying to take control of the railway administration headquarters, which had been occupied by leftists. The rattling of small arms and machine-gun fire was deafening. In the heat of the battle an elevated train filled with urban commuters trundled across the viaduct that spanned the square, seemingly oblivious to the firefight raging below. ‘The screaming is continuous,’ Kessel noted. ‘The whole of Berlin is a bubbling witches’ cauldron where forces and ideas are stirred up together.’21 On 15 January, after an extensive manhunt, the Communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were found, arrested and subsequently beaten to death by members of a cavalry guards division stationed at the Hotel Eden in central Berlin.

  The Communists now seethed with an implacable hatred of the Social Democrats. In March 1919, they called a general strike and fighting once again broke out in Berlin. Some 15,000 armed Communists and fellow travellers seized control of police stations and rail terminals. Determined to break the power of the extreme left at all costs, Gustav Noske brought in 40,000 government and Freikorps troops, who used machine guns, field artillery, mortars, flame-throwers and even aerial strafing and bombardment to put down the rebellion. When the fighting in Berlin came to an end on 16 March, 1,200 people were dead. The violent suppression of the January and March uprisings and the murder of its intellectual leaders dealt the extreme left a blow that it was never prepared to forgive. In their eyes, the Social Democrats had betrayed the German worker to sign a ‘devil’s pact’ with Prussian militarism.22

  No one gave clearer visual expression to this view of events than the Berlin artist George Grosz. Grosz, an early participant in the Berlin Dadaist movement, had been exempted from military service on psychological grounds and had spent the later years of the war in Berlin. In December 1918 he was one of the first wave of Communist Party members, receiving his card personally from the hands of Rosa Luxemburg. He spent the days of the March uprising hiding in the Berlin apartment of his future mother-in-law. In a remarkable polemical drawing published at the beginning of April 1919, Grosz depicted a street littered with blood-stained bodies, one disembowelled. Protruding diagonally into the lower right-hand of the picture frame is a swollen corpse, its trousers pulled down to reveal mutilated genitalia. Standing in the centre foreground, with the heel of his boot pressing on the belly of one of the dead, is the travesty of a Prussian officer, his monocle screwed tightly into his face, his teeth bared in a cramped grimace, his posture ramrod-straight. In his right hand he carries a blood-smeared sword, in hi
s left a raised champagne flute. The caption reads: ‘Cheers Noske! The proletariat is disarmed!’23

  Even for those who did not share Grosz’s Spartakist commitment, Prost Noske! captured something disturbing about the events of early 1919. The extreme violence of the repressions was in itself disquieting. The Freikorps units brought a new brand of politically motivated terrorist ultra-violence to their counter-insurgency operations in the city, hunting out hidden and fleeing leftists and subjecting them to brutal mistreatment and summary executions. The Berlin press reported executions of thirty prisoners at a time by makeshift Freikorps tribunals, and Harry Kessler observed ruefully that a hitherto unknown spirit of ‘blood vengeance’ had entered the city of Berlin. Here – though not only here24 – could be seen the brutalizing effects of the war and the ensuing defeat, the anti-civilian ethos of the military, and the profoundly unsettling ideological impact of Russia’s October Revolution of 1917.

  Another ominous feature of the conflicts of 1919 was the deepening dependence of the new political leadership on a military establishment whose enthusiasm for the emerging German Republic was questionable, to say the least. Exactly how questionable became clear in January 1920, when a number of senior officers refused outright to implement the military stipulations of the Versailles Treaty. Heading the rebellion was none other than General Walther Freiherr von Lüttwitz, who had commanded the troops engaged in the repressions of January and March in Berlin. When Army Minister Noske ordered him to disband the elite Marine Brigade under Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, Lüttwitz refused outright, called for new elections and demanded that he be placed in command of the entire German army. Here was yet another example of that spirit of egotistical insubordination that had been gaining ground within the old-Prussian military leadership since Hindenburg and Ludendorff had held the government to ransom during the First World War.

  54. ‘Cheers Noske! The proletariat is disarmed!’ Drawing for the leftist satirical journal Die Pleite by George Grosz, April 1919.

  On 10 March 1920, Lüttwitz was finally dismissed from active service; two days later he launched a putsch against the government in collaboration with the conservative ultra-nationalist activist Wolfgang Kapp, a political intriguer who had been involved in the fall of Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg in 1917. The aim was to unseat the republican government and establish an autocratic military regime. On 13 March, Lüttwitz and the Ehrhardt Brigade took control of the capital, forcing the government to flee, first to Dresden and then to Stuttgart. Kapp appointed himself Reich chancellor and minister-president of Prussia and Lüttwitz minister of the army and supreme commander of the armed forces. It looked for a moment as if the history of the young republic was already at an end. In the event, the Kapp–Lüttwitz putsch collapsed after only four days – it had been poorly planned and the would-be dictators had no means of dealing with an SPD-sponsored general strike that paralysed German industry and parts of the civil service. Kapp announced his ‘resignation’ on 17 March and quickly slipped off to Sweden; Lüttwitz resigned on the same evening and later resurfaced in Austria.

  The problem of the army and its relationship with the republican authority did not disappear after the failure of the Kapp–Lüttwitz putsch. The chief of the army command from March 1920 was Hans von Seeckt, a Prussian career staff officer from Schleswig-Holstein, who initially refused to oppose Kapp and Lüttwitz, but ostentatiously sided with the government once they had failed. Under his shrewd leadership, the military command focused on building German military strength within the narrow parameters imposed by Versailles and abstained from conspicuous political interventions. Yet the army remained in many respects a foreign body within the fabric of the republic. Its loyalty was not to the existing political authority, but ‘to that permanent and imperishable entity’, the German Reich.25 In an essay published in 1928, Seeckt set out his views on the status of the military within a republican state. He acknowledged that the ‘supreme leadership of the state’ must control the army, but also insisted that ‘the army has the right to demand that its share in the life and the being of the state be given full consideration’–whatever that meant!

  Seeckt’s expansive conception of the army’s status found expression in his claim that ‘in domestic and foreign policy the military interests represented in the army must be given full consideration’ and that the ‘particular way of life’ of the military must be respected. Even more telling was his observation that the army was subordinate only ‘to the state as a whole’ and not ‘to separate parts of the state organization’. The question of who or what exactly embodied the totality of the state remained unresolved, though it is tempting to read these words as encoded articulations of a crypto-monarchism in which allegiance was ultimately focused not on the state, but on the empty throne of the departed Emperor-king. This was, in other words, an army whose legitimacy derived from something outside the existing political order and whose commitment to upholding that order remained conditional.26 Here was a potentially troublesome legacy of the Prussian constitutional tradition, in which the army had sworn its fealty to the monarch and led an existence apart from the structures of civil authority.

  DEMOCRATIC PRUSSIA

  It was as if reality had been turned inside out. The Prussian state had passed through the looking glass of defeat and revolution to emerge with the polarities of its political system in reverse. This was a mirror-world in which Social Democrat ministers despatched troops to put down strikes by leftist workers. A new political elite emerged; former apprentice locksmiths, office clerks and basket-weavers sat behind Prussian ministerial desks. In the new Prussia, according to the Prussian constitution of 30 November 1920, sovereignty rested with ‘the entirety of the people’. The Prussian parliament was no longer convened and dissolved by a higher authority, but summoned itself under rules set out in the constitution. By contrast with the Weimar (national) constitution, which concentrated formidable powers in the person of the Reich president, the Prussian system made do without a president. It was in this sense a more thoroughly democratic and less authoritarian system than the Weimar Republic itself. Throughout the years 1920–32(with a few very brief interruptions), an SPD-led republican coalition consisting of Social Democrats, Centre Party deputies, left-liberals (DDP) and – later – right-liberals (DVP) governed with a majority in the Prussian Landtag. Prussia became the ‘rock of democracy’ in Germany and the chief bastion of political stability within the Weimar Republic. Whereas Weimar politics at the national level were marked by extremism, conflict and the rapid alternation of governments, the Prussian grand coalition held firm and steered a steady course of moderate reform. Whereas the German national parliaments of the Weimar era were periodically cut short by political crises and dissolutions, every one of their Prussian counterparts (except the last) was allowed to live out its full natural lifespan.

  Presiding over this surprisingly stable political system was Prussia’s ‘red Tsar’, Minister-President Otto Braun. The son of a railway clerk in Königsberg, Braun had been trained in his youth as a lithographer, joined the SPD at the age of sixteen in 1888 and soon became well known as a leader of the socialist movement among rural East Prussian labourers. He became a member of the party’s executive council in 1911 and joined the small contingent of SPD deputies in the lower house of the old Prussian Landtag two years later. His sobriety, pragmatism and moderation helped to create a framework for harmonious government in Germany’s largest federal territory. Like many other Social Democrats of his generation, Braun professed a deep attachment to Prussia and a respect for the intrinsic virtue and authority of the Prussian state – an attitude shared to some extent by all the coalition partners. Even the Centre Party made its peace with the state that had once so energetically persecuted Catholics; the high point of their rapprochement was the concordat agreed between the Prussian state and the Vatican on 14 June 1929.27 In 1932, Braun could look back with a certain satisfaction on what had been achieved since the end of the First Wor
ld War. ‘In twelve years,’ he declared in an article for the SPD newspaper Volksbanner in 1932, ‘Prussia, once the state of the crassest class domination and political deprivation of the working classes, the state of the centuries-old feudal Junker caste hegemony, has been transformed into a republican people’s state.’28

  But how deep was the transformation? How profoundly did the new political elite penetrate the fabric of the old Prussian state? The answer depends upon where one looks. If we focus on the judiciary, the achievement of the new power-holders looks unimpressive. There were certainly piecemeal improvements in discrete areas – prison reform, industrial arbitration and administrative rationalization – but little was done to consolidate a pro-republican ethos among the upper ranks of the judicial bureaucracy and particularly among the judges, who tended to remain sceptical of the legitimacy of the new order. Many judges mourned the loss of king and crown – in a famous outburst of 1919, the head of the League of German Judges declared that ‘all majesty lies prostrate, including the majesty of the law.’ It was common knowledge that many judges were biased against left-wing political offenders and prone to look more leniently on the crimes of right-wing extremists.29 The key impediment to radical action by the state in this area was a deeply embedded respect – especially among the liberal and Centre Party coalition partners – for the functional and personal independence of the judge. The autonomy of the judge – his freedom from political reprisals and manipulation – was seen as crucial to the integrity of the judicial process. Once this principle was enshrined in the Prussian constitution of 1920, a thorough-going purge of anti-republican elements in the judiciary became impossible. Changes to the appointments procedures for new judges promised future improvement, as did the setting of a compulsory retirement age, but the system inaugurated in 1920 did not last long enough to allow these adjustments to take effect. A senator of the Supreme Court in Berlin estimated in 1932 that perhaps 5 per cent of the judges sitting on the Prussian bench could be described as supporters of the republic.